It was discovered on 22 August 1985, by American astronomer Edward Bowell at Lowell's Anderson Mesa Station near Flagstaff, Arizona, United States.
Levy orbits the Sun in the inner main-belt at a distance of 1.9–2.8 AU once every 3 years and 7 months (1,312 days).
[10] In December 2007, astronomers from the U.S. Carbuncle Hill Observatory (I00) in Rhode Island, the Czech Ondřejov Observatory, and the Californian Goat Mountain Astronomical Research Station (G79) obtained a rotational lightcurve showing Levy to turn on its axis every 2.688 hours.
[4][5][6][7] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link agrees with the revised WISE-results by Pravec and adopts an albedo of 0.2341 and a diameter of 6.47 kilometers with an absolute magnitude of 13.14.
With Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory in California he discovered Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994.